1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to the field of network connection management. More particularly, embodiments of the present invention relate generally to selecting connections to bump in a network.
2. Related Art
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology is used as a backbone technology for some modern carrier networks. ATM supports network transmission of information including data as well as real-time voice and video. Connections over which information is transmitted within an ATM network can be associated with priority levels. Higher priority connections are serviced before lower priority connections.
In an ATM network, priority bumping requires that lower priority connections need to be bumped or released to free up necessary resources to accommodate an incoming higher priority connection. This occurs when available resources are insufficient to satisfy the requirements of an incoming connection that has a higher priority.
In a typical ATM network, each link (e.g., from a switch) can have thousands of connections transmitting information through that link. Selecting which connections to release to accommodate the incoming connection can be difficult given the high number of connections serviced by the link. Conventional attempts to select connections to be released followed a brute approach that was time consuming and resource intensive. For instance, one prior art approach looped through all the connections on the link to analyze all the possible combinations for releasing connections. Another prior art approach would select any set of connections without any further criteria to free up the required bandwidth.
However, as a disadvantage, these conventional methods for selecting connections to be released to accommodate an incoming higher priority call cannot ensure that the least possible number of connections will be bumped. In addition, these conventional methods inefficiently used resources to employ the brute force techniques that looped through all the connections to select released connections. Also, these conventional brute force methods are not scalable to larger numbers of connections as more and more CPU resources are needed to loop through all the connections.